A comparison of four reverse engineering tools

Reverse engineering tools support software engineers in the process of analyzing and understanding complex software systems during maintenance activities. The functionality of such tools varies from editing and browsing capabilities to the generation of textual and graphical reports. There are several commercial reverse engineering tools on the market providing different capabilities and supporting specific source code languages. We evaluated four reverse engineering tools that analyze C source code: Refine/C, Imagix4D, Sniff+, and Rigi. We investigated the capabilities of these tools by applying them to a commercial embedded software system as a case study. We identified benefits and shortcomings of these four tools and assessed their applicability for embedded software systems, their usability, and their extensibility